Mizzou Graduate Students Lose Health Insurance Because of Obamacare

According to theColumbia Tribune, Mizzou University could be fined $36,500 per student, per year, by the IRS if they continue to help pay for graduate students’ health insurance.

Yes, a penalty for helping people pay for their health care. That’s actually part of Obamacare.

Specifically,

MU Associate Vice Chancellor for Graduate Studies Leona Rubin said the change is the result of a recent IRS interpretation of a section of the Affordable Care Act. The law, which requires adults to have health insurance or face tax penalties, “prohibits businesses from providing employees subsidies specifically for the purpose of purchasing health insurance from individual market plans,” the university said in a letter sent to students Friday.

The IRS, Rubin said, considers the university’s student health insurance plan from Aetna an “individual market plan.” Because of the IRS classification, the university cannot give graduate students with assistantships a subsidy to help with health insurance costs, Rubin said.

If the university continued to do so, Rubin said it could be fined $36,500 per student per year.

Young people voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in 2008 and again in 2012. Many were unaware just how bad his policies would be for them, but it is becoming more and more clear how unfair progressive economics is in practice.

“All of the graduate students I know were promised health coverage when they were given their offers to attend here,” Coffman continued.

Moreover, Coffman said, this is just the latest roadblock the university has placed in the way of graduate students.

“Recently MU dissolved the graduate school, replacing it with an administrative unit not able to represent graduate student needs.” Earlier in the school year, Coffman said, the university pulled tuition waivers from “many graduate students who don’t have ‘full-time’ appointments.”

“They’re systematically making it more and more difficult to go to graduate school here, even though graduate students perform the vast majority of the research which comes out of this campus.”

In a tweet, Coffman laid the blame squarely at the feet of the President.